Anthrocon kinda sucks
This is about the con itself and the silhouettes of it that I saw; I don't mean to imply that my experience was bad, just that the con as an entity is... bad.
I present some events, and some thoughts.
Artist's Alley
For those of you who don't give half a damn, the Alley is a non-committal section of the dealer room. The general process is thus:
1. You sign up for a day. (Or two, or all three.)
2. You get a teeny little table and litter it with your art supplies.
3. You hock your wares. People buy things from you, pay at aggregate registers, and give you a receipt. Con staff mans the registers and takes care of tax or something.
4. You cash out at the end of the day.
Given that the furry community prides itself on being a fountain of artwork and creativity, it would seem that this is the heart of the convention. Let's see how direly it gets screwed up.
1. I went with Mel to the signups for Friday at 10 a.m. Signing up consisted of jamming the 170 people (not kidding) who wanted to get in into a small meeting room, then having them all wait in line to fill out a form. For those enterprising enough to bring a computer without any indication that such a thing would be useful, there was also a Web signup at the obvious URL of http://10.2.2.1/, which I managed to visit on my phone.
The final list was to be announced at 11. So, yes, we got there an hour early to spend twenty seconds visiting a Web site. This was already ominous. (We opted to fill the time finding breakfast.)
Order doesn't matter, either. The alley seating, and the order in which people can claim seats, is assigned purely by lottery. And the lottery is completely independent each day. So if you don't get in on Friday because there are too many people, you are just as likely to still not get in on Saturday; there's no priority or attempt to make it fair. It's just names from a hat.
When we got back, the first thing they did was announce the list of people who didn't make it in. Forty-eight names were read. Four dozen people lost the chance to sell anything at the biggest possible venue. This was mentioned as little more than a cold fact; the person in charge admitted he wasn't proud of this new record high, but made no attempt to lower it. Acquiring extra tables and chairs in a convention center must be an insurmountable task.
The winners were then announced. A number and name were called, that person flailed wildly, a staff member gave him/her a numbered receipt book, and then the next number/name were called. I suppose this works okay for a couple dozen seats, but I estimate there were some one hundred twenty slots to fill. I base this guess on Mel's number, which was 113. Why not just arrange the winners at random in the available space? It would have nearly the same effect and save everyone a lot of wasted time sitting around.
The worst incident, though, came around 92. Our announcer had been reading from a laptop in front of him, and some mysterious problem suddenly plagued it. I can't say what he and another staff member were fiddling with for the next ten minutes, but the result was that he started over. The forty-eight exiles were now back in the drawing, and he started reading names from the beginning, having to skip over half a dozen at a time and checking with the audience whether he'd called them before he found a new name.
Remember, this is the heart of the convention.
3. The other half of the room holding the Alley is called the Dealer's Room (what?), and has larger tables with more permanent residents. Having a Dealer's table requires (a) paying some fee to Anthrocon and (b) being registered as an LLC so you can handle your own taxes and so forth. You handle all exchange of money here, whereas in the Alley, the con does it all for you.
This leads to an interesting problem. The Alley has a few central registers run by staff/volunteers, so it can take credit cards. But if you're a Dealer, you have to handle everything yourself-that is, either you have your own credit card scanner and processor, or you're cash-only. It would seem that the Alley is the vastly superior choice, except for the lottery. In fact, only vendors with a lot of existing physical merchandise to sell have any reason to get a Dealer's table at all, since there's a hard limit on how much a single person can bring into the Alley. This is a strange state of affairs given that the Dealer side directly benefits the convention!
On the customer side, I'm not sure it's actually possible to pay for multiple things at once. I might be wrong, having never tried it, but you have to return your receipt to the artist (what??), so I assume there can only be one artist covered per receipt. How tedious.
4. Having had to wait for Mel to wait through this process five times now, I'm acutely aware of how dog slow it is for the staff to actually cash anyone out. I don't know exactly what the process is, but it can't be anything good, since the registers are literally just registers. There's no point-of-sale software, and everything is tracked with little scraps of paper-several per transaction, in fact. I'm hoping the cash-out process is more clever than simply totaling all the receipts and doling out that much cash, but I fear that's exactly how it works.
And, yes, your only option is getting cash right there. You can't get a check or any other more elegant+secure means of payment. Anthrocon is giving many dozens of skinny pasty white nerds giant rolls of cash and sending them into a downtown metropolis. This is a fantastic idea. I know for a fact it's possible to make in excess of a thousand dollars in a day, too, and it will all be paid out in $20 bills.
Wares
The other big problem with the Dealer's Room (perhaps not so much the Alley) is that it's utterly unchanging. The stuff that was here this year is the same stuff that was there last year. The artists are the same and have been taking commissions online all year. They have an "art show" too, which is a thinly-veiled attempt to make porn look fancy, and-surprise!-it's all stuff that's been on the artist's site for ten months.
It turns out that taking a bunch of people from the internet and having them sell the same stuff in meatspace is not really that exciting a prospect. Shocking.
Paneling
If the art is the heart of the convention, then clearly panels are the.. erm, lungs, or some other important organ. This is what conventions are for: talking about or learning about or exploring something new and interesting.
But not so at Anthrocon! Here is a selection from the programming guide:
Memories of Wolfie, a memorial for Wolfie Darkwolfie. You are reading that name correctly.
To Absent Friends, a two-hour event dedicated to remembering the people who couldn't make it to the con.
Furthia High, dedicated to this pretty bad webcomic.
Physically Challenged in the Furry Community, led by I think the one guy in the community who is actually physically challenged.
Immediately followed by Furries and Sports. In the same room. You can't make this up.
Hyenas are Awesome. I think it's about hyenas. They're awesome?
Florida Furs, for a group of people who already live near each other, already have a dedicated group, and who all happen to have left their neighborhood and visited the same other neighborhood at the same time.
Hybrid Havoc, for furries with hybrid-species avatars.
Women in the Fandom. Unfortunately, they were both too busy hanging out with our group to attend.
Furries of World of Warcraft, dedicated to I'm running out of jokes.
Doctor Who LARP, and I have to stop now.
There's some art stuff, yes. There's some video game stuff, though I visited the game room and immediately left because it was so ridiculously cramped and felt like a used sauna. But so much of the programming is either inane cruft or completely orthogonal to furry.
I didn't think quite so much of this until I went to conferences that were actually about things. It turns out that panels are actually meant to be relevant. I'd never before had the experience of scheduling conflicts-actually wanting to go to multiple things at the same time because they were all interesting!
And it's not like furry panels are particularly exciting, either; they're often some socially awkward guy just talking for his allotted time. Even for a topic I'd otherwise be interested in, it was mind-numbing.
Official Art
It's pretty astounding just how terrible all the con's official art is. The badges and the custom do-not-disturb hotel doorhangers are, by far, the most frequently-seen official art of anything at the convention, right? But the badges are mediocre at best, and the doorhangers are embarrassingly ugly. They got a deal from the hotel to print and let us keep custom door keys, too, and those are equally unappealing.
Furry is "an artistic and literary genre that is practiced and enjoyed by tens of thousands worldwide", but they can't make the effort to get the best of the best to do the art everyone sees. Hell, while I'm at it, even the Anthrocon site looks terrible, despite that "a large number of anthropomorphics fans are employed in scientific or technical fields".
This is supposed to be a creative and artistic subculture, yet the biggest gathering can't manage to make its public face reflect that at all.
Security
I'm getting pretty tired of dudes in black leather skirts, furry cheetah-print stockings, and red t-shirts (I am dead serious) herding everyone around like fifth-graders during recess. And I don't make this comparison lightly; I was just making fun of such people days before the convention, thinking themselves important for having the illusion of power over children, and then discovered that a few of them grew up to be furries.
Rationing the elevators is all well and good, but as the days wore on, the security was increasingly holding doors and telling people how to use the elevators. I do not exaggerate when I say that I started expecting them to come inside and push the buttons for us. I had the privilege of riding up with a redshirt once, and having the elevator called to the third floor, a forbidden act that circumvents the elevator line in the lobby. I can't bear to repeat his commentary; it was too pompous for my fingers.
Last year, I believe the fursuit parade went over the convention center roof. This year, the doors to the roof were all bound shut with signs indicating that congoers were forbidden from the roof. What? It's paved and it has handrails; it's very clearly meant to be a publicly-accessible area. The architecture is nice and the view is probably one of the least-bad you'll get in Pittsburgh. Did some idiot fall over the railing? Are we worried that some suicidal teenager will jump off the fourth floor?
I remember wandering around an unused floor during some downtime last year, then coming down the stairs far from the commonly-trodden area near the Dealer's Room. A security person saw me walking back towards the common area and waved me over, as though I weren't supposed to be near the stairs and its forbidden lure of locked empty rooms.
I honestly can't figure out if the security staff reflects worse on themselves or on the people they are charged with "guarding". The question haunts my nightmares.
Every year the con feels more stale and mismanaged. Its staff seem no more competent than the twenty-somethings who attend, which is strange when the fearless leader's gimmick is a lab coat.
I think there are two problems here.
1. "Furry" isn't really about anything. Technical conferences are about a certain technology and its applications; media conventions (e.g., video games) are about a medium; even anime cons are about a broad smattering of things. But furry isn't a genre or a medium; it's just an extra label that can intersect a lot of other things. Many of the panels are about video games or RPing or some other subculture; they're completely orthogonal to the idea of furry, and in the case of the best event (Live Action Chess) aren't really related at all.
So the best we can get is really just "the best guy who does X and calls himself a furry". Take 2, who is sort of mediocre at standup, but who is celebrated by furries because he is the best furry at standup. So he gets his own timeslot at furry conventions.
What else does this leave? Fursuit building panels, selling furry art, and selling dragon dongs. A class act. Everything else is sort of filler or social cruft.
2. The fandom encourages mediocrity.
It's subtle and unfortunate. Anyone who's half-good at anything can easily gain praise, and once popularity kicks in, the praise hits a big feedback loop. The fandom only has praise or not-praise, too, so there's little differentiation between okay and fantastic. Worse, critique is easily mistaken for antagonism ("""trolling"""), so the community actively tries to filter out anything but the bland mush of compliments. If someone is a particularly good artist, s/he is most likely to go find a Real Job somewhere and/or migrate to a community with a more refined and useful artistic sense.
There's nothing to really attract new good talent or breed existing talent, and every reason for it to leave. Why would you stick around when all your fans are just as happy to laud someone half as good as you, what's the point? Unless you're only in it for the praise, in which case you're going to be mediocre anyway.
I can't even name names, because it would start a conflict. Suffice to say, there are plenty of people who act or think or are treated as experts but are.. quite not.
I HOPE THIS EXPLAINS MY TWEET, SAPP. It's just become very obvious that the con itself is sort of not great and gets in the way more than anything.
I present some events, and some thoughts.
Artist's Alley
For those of you who don't give half a damn, the Alley is a non-committal section of the dealer room. The general process is thus:
1. You sign up for a day. (Or two, or all three.)
2. You get a teeny little table and litter it with your art supplies.
3. You hock your wares. People buy things from you, pay at aggregate registers, and give you a receipt. Con staff mans the registers and takes care of tax or something.
4. You cash out at the end of the day.
Given that the furry community prides itself on being a fountain of artwork and creativity, it would seem that this is the heart of the convention. Let's see how direly it gets screwed up.
1. I went with Mel to the signups for Friday at 10 a.m. Signing up consisted of jamming the 170 people (not kidding) who wanted to get in into a small meeting room, then having them all wait in line to fill out a form. For those enterprising enough to bring a computer without any indication that such a thing would be useful, there was also a Web signup at the obvious URL of http://10.2.2.1/, which I managed to visit on my phone.
The final list was to be announced at 11. So, yes, we got there an hour early to spend twenty seconds visiting a Web site. This was already ominous. (We opted to fill the time finding breakfast.)
Order doesn't matter, either. The alley seating, and the order in which people can claim seats, is assigned purely by lottery. And the lottery is completely independent each day. So if you don't get in on Friday because there are too many people, you are just as likely to still not get in on Saturday; there's no priority or attempt to make it fair. It's just names from a hat.
When we got back, the first thing they did was announce the list of people who didn't make it in. Forty-eight names were read. Four dozen people lost the chance to sell anything at the biggest possible venue. This was mentioned as little more than a cold fact; the person in charge admitted he wasn't proud of this new record high, but made no attempt to lower it. Acquiring extra tables and chairs in a convention center must be an insurmountable task.
The winners were then announced. A number and name were called, that person flailed wildly, a staff member gave him/her a numbered receipt book, and then the next number/name were called. I suppose this works okay for a couple dozen seats, but I estimate there were some one hundred twenty slots to fill. I base this guess on Mel's number, which was 113. Why not just arrange the winners at random in the available space? It would have nearly the same effect and save everyone a lot of wasted time sitting around.
The worst incident, though, came around 92. Our announcer had been reading from a laptop in front of him, and some mysterious problem suddenly plagued it. I can't say what he and another staff member were fiddling with for the next ten minutes, but the result was that he started over. The forty-eight exiles were now back in the drawing, and he started reading names from the beginning, having to skip over half a dozen at a time and checking with the audience whether he'd called them before he found a new name.
Remember, this is the heart of the convention.
3. The other half of the room holding the Alley is called the Dealer's Room (what?), and has larger tables with more permanent residents. Having a Dealer's table requires (a) paying some fee to Anthrocon and (b) being registered as an LLC so you can handle your own taxes and so forth. You handle all exchange of money here, whereas in the Alley, the con does it all for you.
This leads to an interesting problem. The Alley has a few central registers run by staff/volunteers, so it can take credit cards. But if you're a Dealer, you have to handle everything yourself-that is, either you have your own credit card scanner and processor, or you're cash-only. It would seem that the Alley is the vastly superior choice, except for the lottery. In fact, only vendors with a lot of existing physical merchandise to sell have any reason to get a Dealer's table at all, since there's a hard limit on how much a single person can bring into the Alley. This is a strange state of affairs given that the Dealer side directly benefits the convention!
On the customer side, I'm not sure it's actually possible to pay for multiple things at once. I might be wrong, having never tried it, but you have to return your receipt to the artist (what??), so I assume there can only be one artist covered per receipt. How tedious.
4. Having had to wait for Mel to wait through this process five times now, I'm acutely aware of how dog slow it is for the staff to actually cash anyone out. I don't know exactly what the process is, but it can't be anything good, since the registers are literally just registers. There's no point-of-sale software, and everything is tracked with little scraps of paper-several per transaction, in fact. I'm hoping the cash-out process is more clever than simply totaling all the receipts and doling out that much cash, but I fear that's exactly how it works.
And, yes, your only option is getting cash right there. You can't get a check or any other more elegant+secure means of payment. Anthrocon is giving many dozens of skinny pasty white nerds giant rolls of cash and sending them into a downtown metropolis. This is a fantastic idea. I know for a fact it's possible to make in excess of a thousand dollars in a day, too, and it will all be paid out in $20 bills.
Wares
The other big problem with the Dealer's Room (perhaps not so much the Alley) is that it's utterly unchanging. The stuff that was here this year is the same stuff that was there last year. The artists are the same and have been taking commissions online all year. They have an "art show" too, which is a thinly-veiled attempt to make porn look fancy, and-surprise!-it's all stuff that's been on the artist's site for ten months.
It turns out that taking a bunch of people from the internet and having them sell the same stuff in meatspace is not really that exciting a prospect. Shocking.
Paneling
If the art is the heart of the convention, then clearly panels are the.. erm, lungs, or some other important organ. This is what conventions are for: talking about or learning about or exploring something new and interesting.
But not so at Anthrocon! Here is a selection from the programming guide:
Memories of Wolfie, a memorial for Wolfie Darkwolfie. You are reading that name correctly.
To Absent Friends, a two-hour event dedicated to remembering the people who couldn't make it to the con.
Furthia High, dedicated to this pretty bad webcomic.
Physically Challenged in the Furry Community, led by I think the one guy in the community who is actually physically challenged.
Immediately followed by Furries and Sports. In the same room. You can't make this up.
Hyenas are Awesome. I think it's about hyenas. They're awesome?
Florida Furs, for a group of people who already live near each other, already have a dedicated group, and who all happen to have left their neighborhood and visited the same other neighborhood at the same time.
Hybrid Havoc, for furries with hybrid-species avatars.
Women in the Fandom. Unfortunately, they were both too busy hanging out with our group to attend.
Furries of World of Warcraft, dedicated to I'm running out of jokes.
Doctor Who LARP, and I have to stop now.
There's some art stuff, yes. There's some video game stuff, though I visited the game room and immediately left because it was so ridiculously cramped and felt like a used sauna. But so much of the programming is either inane cruft or completely orthogonal to furry.
I didn't think quite so much of this until I went to conferences that were actually about things. It turns out that panels are actually meant to be relevant. I'd never before had the experience of scheduling conflicts-actually wanting to go to multiple things at the same time because they were all interesting!
And it's not like furry panels are particularly exciting, either; they're often some socially awkward guy just talking for his allotted time. Even for a topic I'd otherwise be interested in, it was mind-numbing.
Official Art
It's pretty astounding just how terrible all the con's official art is. The badges and the custom do-not-disturb hotel doorhangers are, by far, the most frequently-seen official art of anything at the convention, right? But the badges are mediocre at best, and the doorhangers are embarrassingly ugly. They got a deal from the hotel to print and let us keep custom door keys, too, and those are equally unappealing.
Furry is "an artistic and literary genre that is practiced and enjoyed by tens of thousands worldwide", but they can't make the effort to get the best of the best to do the art everyone sees. Hell, while I'm at it, even the Anthrocon site looks terrible, despite that "a large number of anthropomorphics fans are employed in scientific or technical fields".
This is supposed to be a creative and artistic subculture, yet the biggest gathering can't manage to make its public face reflect that at all.
Security
I'm getting pretty tired of dudes in black leather skirts, furry cheetah-print stockings, and red t-shirts (I am dead serious) herding everyone around like fifth-graders during recess. And I don't make this comparison lightly; I was just making fun of such people days before the convention, thinking themselves important for having the illusion of power over children, and then discovered that a few of them grew up to be furries.
Rationing the elevators is all well and good, but as the days wore on, the security was increasingly holding doors and telling people how to use the elevators. I do not exaggerate when I say that I started expecting them to come inside and push the buttons for us. I had the privilege of riding up with a redshirt once, and having the elevator called to the third floor, a forbidden act that circumvents the elevator line in the lobby. I can't bear to repeat his commentary; it was too pompous for my fingers.
Last year, I believe the fursuit parade went over the convention center roof. This year, the doors to the roof were all bound shut with signs indicating that congoers were forbidden from the roof. What? It's paved and it has handrails; it's very clearly meant to be a publicly-accessible area. The architecture is nice and the view is probably one of the least-bad you'll get in Pittsburgh. Did some idiot fall over the railing? Are we worried that some suicidal teenager will jump off the fourth floor?
I remember wandering around an unused floor during some downtime last year, then coming down the stairs far from the commonly-trodden area near the Dealer's Room. A security person saw me walking back towards the common area and waved me over, as though I weren't supposed to be near the stairs and its forbidden lure of locked empty rooms.
I honestly can't figure out if the security staff reflects worse on themselves or on the people they are charged with "guarding". The question haunts my nightmares.
Every year the con feels more stale and mismanaged. Its staff seem no more competent than the twenty-somethings who attend, which is strange when the fearless leader's gimmick is a lab coat.
I think there are two problems here.
1. "Furry" isn't really about anything. Technical conferences are about a certain technology and its applications; media conventions (e.g., video games) are about a medium; even anime cons are about a broad smattering of things. But furry isn't a genre or a medium; it's just an extra label that can intersect a lot of other things. Many of the panels are about video games or RPing or some other subculture; they're completely orthogonal to the idea of furry, and in the case of the best event (Live Action Chess) aren't really related at all.
So the best we can get is really just "the best guy who does X and calls himself a furry". Take 2, who is sort of mediocre at standup, but who is celebrated by furries because he is the best furry at standup. So he gets his own timeslot at furry conventions.
What else does this leave? Fursuit building panels, selling furry art, and selling dragon dongs. A class act. Everything else is sort of filler or social cruft.
2. The fandom encourages mediocrity.
It's subtle and unfortunate. Anyone who's half-good at anything can easily gain praise, and once popularity kicks in, the praise hits a big feedback loop. The fandom only has praise or not-praise, too, so there's little differentiation between okay and fantastic. Worse, critique is easily mistaken for antagonism ("""trolling"""), so the community actively tries to filter out anything but the bland mush of compliments. If someone is a particularly good artist, s/he is most likely to go find a Real Job somewhere and/or migrate to a community with a more refined and useful artistic sense.
There's nothing to really attract new good talent or breed existing talent, and every reason for it to leave. Why would you stick around when all your fans are just as happy to laud someone half as good as you, what's the point? Unless you're only in it for the praise, in which case you're going to be mediocre anyway.
I can't even name names, because it would start a conflict. Suffice to say, there are plenty of people who act or think or are treated as experts but are.. quite not.
I HOPE THIS EXPLAINS MY TWEET, SAPP. It's just become very obvious that the con itself is sort of not great and gets in the way more than anything.